Tag Archives: Seattle

Congress for the New Urbanism has produced a report on the spatial hardship of living in sprawl. Lower income people often find themselves pushed outward to places where transportation drains their resources when it comes to community participation, shopping, access to employment or public services. CNU should be commended for adding greater depth to their general critique of placemaking with this document. Seattle/Tacoma is the focus of the report but it’s general assumptions are applicable beyond there.

Last year the Urban Land Institute produced a document with a half dozen case studies of communities doing sprawl repair, adding transit infrastructure, and undertaking suburban retrofits. It’s nice to see these projects because it seems logical that a better designed community offers its residents some insurance against difficulty compared to poorly thought out, low density, car-dependent ones, the kind that are everywhere. These projects and their various components represent at least a good attempt at adapting the lived-in North American landscape to an emergent future which doesn’t really support the things that made suburbia possible any more, namely E-Z money and cheap energy.

Our relatively limited experience of these refitted places is that they rely too much on retail and ironically, cars. What will happen to the major continental chains like Starbucks or The Gap as we move forward is not fully clear. They and their global supply chains may contract along with everything else. A coffee bar an upstairs tenant can walk to doesn’t mean much if the windows are boarded up. One of our interns was in Toronto’s Liberty Village this weekend. Liberty Village is not so much a refitted suburb as a refitted industrial area but it models many of the same attributes as ULI’s case studies. “Don’t know when I’ve ever seen so many luxury SUVs, Minis, Japanese sports cars, German sedans in one place, ever,” said our intern. The very success and enjoyability of the area’s renovated buildings, its retail opportunities and so forth attracts loads of people, many of whom arrive by car even though there’s multiple possibilities for arrival by public transit.

America hasthink tanks. It would be tough to count just how many there are. Luckily, at least one or two are getting their collective brain power around suburban poverty. This posting links to a research brief from the Center for Studying Health Care Change. The brief looks at health care data for poorer suburban populations in Boston, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Miami, and Seattle. It seems these populations rely on visits to hospital emergency departments and face barriers to service including transportation. Many suburban poor it seems also travel to hospitals in older core areas that face this demand for service on top of local, urban demands. This document adds thoughtful detail to what suburban poverty means in the United States.Suburban poverty and the health care safety net